Lost and Found at the River's Edge

Art by Sherlock.

This morning I wrote a rant about revising Heirs of Mâvarin.  I wrote it as a series of tweets because I am trying to cultivate my Twitter presence a bit, after a photo I posted from Gallifrey One went viral last week. But for those of you who know about my decades-long struggle with the book, here's a bit more detail.

The whole point of Heirs is an exploration of how changing perceptions of who you are - which may be arbitrarily imposed on you - affect who you actually become. If you're told that everything you knew about yourself was a lie (real world equivalent: learning at age 16 that you were adopted and your original name is Mabel, or that your mother had an affair and your real dad is your Mom's friend Bill), how does that change your priorities and your sense of identity?

So Del and Crel learn separately that they are hidden royalty, a fairly common trope in fantasy, except that in many books the character either knows the truth all along (e.g. Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings) or gets the change of status at the end of the book (e.g. Shasta/Cor in The Horse and His Boy). Heirs is supposed to tackle the psychology of that change in status, which parallels Rani's journey of self-discovery after learning he is a monster (specifically a tengrem) and the son of monsters.

But here's the problem. For all these years I've had Jamek, the twins' supposed uncle, tell Crel the truth about herself the morning after Del runs away. That gives her three days of story time to react to the problem before Del learns the truth from Shela, although he's had a day and a half of entertaining the possibility. With my 150,000+ word novel now broken into three books, the first volume lacks a proper climax unless the twins learn the truth at the same time toward the end, preferably with some physical danger thrown in. This has the added bonus of the reader possibly being surprised at the same time as the characters, instead of being told something the reader knows already. (Mind you, the savvy reader will probably figure it out before the characters do, but there's a self-congratulatory aspect to that which can be almost as good as the surprise.) So everything Crel thinks and says for most of the book needs to change. That's kind of exciting, and necessary, but it makes for a big mess!

Last night I was at a meeting of the Tucson Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers group, which currently is in desperate need of more people who will actually show up. My friend Jan wanted more excitement and emotional reactions to events, more personal danger, and more direct involvement by my main characters. I disagreed with much of what she said, but it was very clear to me that the plot structure of the first third of the story does not work as a stand-alone novel. There are lots of trilogies in which the first volume is not a complete, self-contained story, but it should at least end with a bang and a resolution of sorts, while setting things in motion for the next book. As it stands now, Heirs of Mâvarin, Book One: River's Edge pretty much ends with a whimper. Crel meets a boy, and Del decides to continue his quest. Well, of course he does. Yes, he has to escape from a trap in the house at Liftlabeth, but that's a mere flourish.

But if Jamek lies to Crel again after Del runs away, then instead of thinking about being the princess while traveling to Thâlemar, Crel spends that time sussing out that Jamek is hiding something, and deducing the truth from hints dropped by tricky old Fayubi. She figures it out the same morning that Del does, and that becomes part of the payoff for River's Edge. I think that's right and necessary, but it completely changes her perspective in what she says and does. It also takes away the one thing that makes my use of the hidden royalty trope less of a cliché. Still, the second and third books will still get to explore the psychology of it all, and this time Crel won't have the advantage of a three day head start on the truth.

Another suggested change, along with several other suggestions I rejected, was to get Del into the action a bit on Day One of  the story, aside from his cameo in the opening scene. That makes sense for his character, since he starts out as a Tom Sawyer to Rani's Huck Finn, always getting in scrapes until events start him on the road to maturity. So last night, when I should have been sleeping and recovering from my cold, I wrote a scene in which Del and Crel argue about Del taking a break from mucking out stalls. It's a decent character bit but it tells us nothing we don't learn elsewhere, and it ends with Del defiantly leaving the stable anyway. My friend wanted me to have Del witness either the end of Rani's fight with the tengrem (somehow without seeing exactly what happened to Rani, the central mystery that drives the plot for another 20 pages), or the body being pulled from the river, with Del thinking it's Rani until later that night. But having him see something and not really see it doesn't quite work, especially since the very next scene reveals that the body is that of a stranger. There isn't any place Del can go on Day One that tells him or the reader anything useful, while holding back other revelations for later. If he can't do anything that advances the plot, he's better off mucking out stalls, with Crel blackmailing him to keep him out of trouble. And I'm not sure we need to see that on the page.

It should be an exciting, frustrating couple of weeks while I sort this all out!  If you have been one of my beta readers, or would like to be, let me know whether you'd like to come along on my journey of rediscovering my characters in the service of a new, improved story.

Karen

Travels With Frank #2: An Origin Story

Those of you who were blogging at AOLJournals in the old days may remember a blogger named Mary, who used to write about her Italian-American father. He lived in some kind of assisted living facility, and she would spent significant time visiting him. She also got to know and spend time with other residents, who weren't so lucky as to have relatives who turned up frequently to see them. Mary's posts were loving and strong and honest, not hiding at all from the difficulties of the situation. I really admired her for that, and was glad I wasn't going through the same thing.

Now I am.

Dad gets a haircut, 8/10/2013. He's obsessed these days with being clean-shaven.

I don't promise I can write about all this as steadily or as wisely as Mary did. I'm not sure exactly what my situation and my dad's calls for, here and now, but I know I need to say more than I've been saying. Recently I asked whether I should be blogging about my dad's dementia, and I got two votes for, two against. The first two comments were the nays. The concern was that I would violate my dad's privacy and dignity, putting him on display like a cute cat video. I can see that as a potential problem, but I don't think what I plan to do here will rise (or sink) to that level. I may make a few YouTube videos at some point, but if I do it won't be to have my Dad perform for the camera.

I also have more than a few things to say about parts of my life that don't involve my Dad.

Building on last night's intro, I'd like to use this entry to explain further the dynamics of the situation, and to respond to Bea's and Wil's comments to the previous post.

First: here's a quick look at the family tree.

My parents, Frank E Funk and Ruth Anne Johnson Funk, were divorced in 1976. My mom moved to Florida and lived in the Space Coast area for something like 17 years before moving here to Tucson. She had mild dementia in later years, compounded by mental health issues. Her last days, in late 2002, were a bit of a horror show, and I'm convinced that her extreme vagueness at the end was more psychiatric than memory-related.

Dad married Ruth Christy (formerly Ruth Christy Sisley) in 1977, and they moved to North Carolina around the beginning of 1989. Ruth had two daughters from her previous marriage, Jan and Amy, both around my age. They're both terrific people, but we never spent significant time together. They were very close to their mom, of course, and grew to love my dad as well. Financially and geographically, they were able to visit Dad and Ruth much more often than I was. I was a bit jealous of that!

Ruth was always wonderful to me, and she and Dad had a terrific marriage. Being younger than my Dad, Ruth always assumed she would be around to care for him at the end of his life, and they made their financial arrangements accordingly. But she was diagnosed with cancer in the spring of 2012 and died very soon after. I was on the phone with her four days before my dad found her body in the kitchen, and tried unsuccessfully to wake her up. Nowadays he doesn't always remember that she died at all. He wonders why he's not home in Wilmington with her, and whether she knows where he is.

Dad, Steve and me, December 2012.

My own brother, Steve, lives in the Cleveland area. His health is poor and his finances aren't much better. My dad used to worry about Steve a lot, when he was still capable of worrying about such things. One good thing about this dementia is that it seems to have blunted his emotional response to painful situations. Dad doesn't seem to feel Ruth's death as keenly as he otherwise would, although I'm sure he misses her. I'm not sure how much he remembers Steve at all, let alone Steve's heart issues and financial problems. As Jan says, Dad has trouble remembering who someone is unless they are right in front of him.

In 2011 or so, Jan had moved to Wilmington, NC to spend more time with her mom. My Dad had a few strokes and fibrillation early that year, leading to significant memory loss after his being remarkably active and functional well into his old age. When Ruth died, Amy and I flew out to Wilmington and strategized before and after the funeral. The plan was to keep Dad in his home as long as he could be safe and comfortable there. Jan was next on the list as successor power of attorney, so she set about settling the estate, making sure bills were paid and hiring caregivers, led by a wonderful woman called Bunny. But by November Dad was in the hospital with heart problems, kidney problems and a UTI. If he survived, he needed to move into a facility that could do more for him than Bunny and Co. could. And Jan and her husband wanted to move back to Vermont. The logical thing was for Dad to come here. Jan and I researched assisted living facilities in Tucson with memory care, which could also keep an eye on him medically. We settled on Cascades of Tucson. I'll pick up the story from there tomorrow night.

Regarding questions about the Mâvarin books: yes, Wil and Bea, I do intend to publish them as e-books. I was well on my way through a final edit on Heirs of Mâvarin when I got sidetracked by other concerns, mostly Dad. Part of the purpose of this return to blogging is to get me back into the discipline of writing in general, so that I can get the books done as well. One thing I still need to complete the project is a good cover illustration. I approached a former next door neighbor from 40 years ago who has illustrated children's books, and asked whether she would be interested in a commission, but I haven't heard back. Maybe she doesn't want to tell me I can't afford her services, or assumes I'm not serious and prepared to pay for them. But looking at the e-books I download, I can see that a professional quality cover image is a must. Any leads, anyone?

Karen

Weekend Assignment #329: Seek and Ye Shall Find - Eventually

It's taken me all week to get to this entry, but the result is a bit of an extravaganza. You see, I did find something this week that had been lost for years - a few somethings, in fact.

Weekend Assignment #329: Lost and Found

Have you ever lost something important (or else just really unusual), only to find it again months or even years later? Were you glad to get it back, or was it no longer worth having by then? Tell us your tale of memorable things lost and found. Alternatively, if you never, ever lost anything important, tell us how you manage this nearly superhuman accomplishment. ;)

Extra Credit: If you could choose one missing item to mysteriously reappear in your home tonight, what would it be and why?

When I wrote this last week, I was frustrated because I had lost a piece of paper with a vital phone number on it. It was the number of the social worker whose agency had suddenly cut their contribution to S's monthly rent by $59 with no warning or explanation. Aside from that underwriting and food stamps, which have also been cut for no good reason, S. lives on Social Security alone, which I use to pay her bills from her bank account, plus a small weekly allowance for her day to day expenses. Believe me, there is no extra $59 sitting around each month to be put toward rent. This past Sunday, S. told me she had run out of money and food stamps, and was unable to buy the few things she went to Albertson's for. There isn't much I can do for her financially: even if we could afford it, Social Security would count any cash gifts as income, and reduce her benefit accordingly.

Anyway, I wrote that number down on Monday afternoon, couldn't find it on Tuesday, turned it up on Thursday and called the social worker. Her voicemail promised a return call by close of business the next day. Six days later, there's been no peep of a response. But S. is meeting with someone over there today, I think, so I've put her on the case, to advocate for herself. Sometimes these agencies would talk to anyone other than the client, even a representative payee such as myself.

But that's not what I wanted to tell you about today.

When I was in college the first time around, I lived in a dorm called Haven Hall for a year and a half at Syracuse University. My parents got divorced during that period, the house was sold, my mom moved to Florida and my dad moved into an apartment, having sold pretty much everyone of mine that I hadn't taken to college with me, nine miles away. At the time of the garage sale, I was in Florida with my mom. I had a trunk of clothes and whatever had been in the dorm room with me, and whatever I'd bought that summer, mostly used comics. My dad didn't realize I was counting on him to store the rest for me, so away it went. This is part of why I'm so sensitive about getting rid of - or losing - my possessions, and part of what makes the Museum of the Weird such a glorious mess of exhibits and artifacts.

And boxes.

Back in my dorm room days, my friend Evelyn and I postulated that there was a wandering vortex in my room, which sucked up specific items into another universe and then redeposited them in a different spot, usually months later. That vortex has followed me around for 35 years now, through at least three states (possibly as many as six, if you count visits to my mom and my six weeks at Michigan State for the Clarion Writer's Workshop). Casa Blocher, the Museum of the Weird, is a decent sized house, but it's not bigger on the inside, and does not comfortably hold my surviving childhood possessions, drafts of stories, old clothes, yard sale finds, books, Quantum Leap collection, Doctor Who collection, books and other stuff, in addition to John's Star Trek (TOS) collection, eBay purchases and Sherlockiana, along with more books, DVDs, CDs, cassettes, midcentury modern furniture, and stuff bought to sell on eBay only we never did.

St. Michael's is having an English Faire in September, which includes a book sale, a jumble sale and a collectibles sale. John and I are determined to go through as many of our boxes as possible and though the house generally, and donate pretty much everything of value that I can bear to part with to St. Michael's. Yesterday I took over two boxes of office supplies (which St. Michael's will mostly keep and use), my mom's curlers, a Barbra Streisand cassette, four paperback fantasy novels, a hardcover fantasy, a set of plastic Hunchback figure from the Disney film, a plastic Mickey and Minnie, a carved wooden elephant, a child's puzzle that was a Christmas stocking stuffer, a hot pink straw purse, and a Wedgwood ash tray of my Mom's from the early 1970s. Oh, and four Hallmark Barbie ornaments, mint in box.

In going through boxes this past Monday to produce these donations, I found a number of interesting things, some of which I didn't know I had. A draft of my unsent letter to Piers Anthony turned up, reminding me of last week's Weekend Assignment. A small clipping from a Florida newspaper turned out to be a reminiscence of my mom's best and worst jobs ever, filling in a little info that it's far too late to ask her about. (I'm going to put it on her memorial page.) My mom's will was in one of the boxes, and commencement announcements from when I finally did graduate from college, and a letter from one of my 1978 English professors about how to make up my incomplete in his course - which I did but he never turned in the grade.

Perhaps best of all, I found two chapters of my Route 66 book in hardcopy, consisting of the George Maharis and Martin Milner interviews. I've been looking for those for at least 15 years. They were typed on a Commodore 64, and getting the data from a C64 cassette or weird floppy or whatever it was into a modern Word file has been a problem that always defeated us. Now I can scan and OCR the things, and clean them up from there. Interestingly, the Maharis chapter is accompanied by a cover letter to an agent at Triad, the multimedia agency where my friend Robin used to work. The letter is a textbook example of what not to write when trying to interest an agent, full of self-deprecation and self-doubt. Ah, well.

The last thing that turned up after years of searching for it was my watercolor map of Mâvarin, three years after the equally joyous discovery of my black and white map of Mâvarin. Neither map is usable now, because they were both persistently lost during the period when I wrote the bulk of the Mages of Mâvarin trilogy circa 1999-2002. Fabi Stock did a lot of traveling in those books, to places that weren't on the old maps because I couldn't consult them. Someday I'll need to either use a really good map generator program or hire someone (Sherlock, perhaps) to draw me a new map. It's far too late to change Fabi's journey instead; Mâvarin has changed and developed a lot in the three decades plus since these maps were drawn.

So tonight I'll probably dig through more boxes. What is the #1 long-lost thing I'd like to turn up? The title to my mom's 1984 Chrysler New Yorker. We want to donate this, and John's 1984 Dodge Van, to some charity and get them out of the driveway. I found the van's title (not that I know where it is now), but not the Chrysler one. John says to get a replacement title from the state but I'm being stubborn. If I don't find it soon, I may have to yield to the logic of the situation!

Karen

The Nerve

This is just a quick note to mark the fact that I submitted Heirs of Mâvarin to an agent for the first time in several years. Ethan Ellenberg is John Scalzi's agent, and currently soliciting new clients, but that's not the only reason I'm giving him a try. Years ago - five years at least, maybe longer - I read an article by Ellenberg in one of those Writer's Market-type books I tend to buy every year. I don't think it was Writer's Market itself, but some competing directory of literary agents.  In any case, the article stuck in my mind as being especially engaging and helpful, even if I can't remember exactly what book it was in.

More to the point, Ellenberg's agency represents sf and fantasy, especially fantasy, and even YA fantasy. It's always seemed like a perfect match for me. So why did I never query him until now? Fear. The fact that he's Scalzi's agent makes him a major player, at least in my estimation. I didn't want to submit work to him until I was certain I had the best possible query letter, synopsis, and opening chapters. So I tinkered away, confused myself with conflicting advice from friends, and ultimately got sidetracked with school and jobs, blogging and Facebook.

Shame on me.

But no longer. Last night I wrestled with a few paragraphs that have been bugging me for years, and finally conquered them - I hope. This morning, after four hours of sleep, I broke my earlier chapters into smaller chunks, on the theory that most people don't write chapters the length of War and Peace, much less submit them that way. The chapters are edited and formatted, the synopsis looks good, the query email is nice and short, and the whole thing is sent out.

And now I'm going to bed, wired as I am after finally doing something my Inner Weasel had successfully discouraged for years. Now I must try not to obsess about what response I'll get, if any, but get on with everything else I need to do, writing and otherwise.

Karen

Look What I Found!

(with apologies to Julie.)

I've been promising since Christmas or so that I would dig up the title for my mom's 1984 Chrysler New Yorker, so that I could have it hauled away as a donation to some charity or other, and get it the heck out of the driveway. I'm not fond of hunting through boxes, though, so I kept putting it off until tonight. I knew it was in either a file box or an accordion file, so a little while ago I grabbed one of the file boxes on my shelves, opened it and took a look.

It wasn't the right box. Not remotely. But I'm very glad I opened that green file box.

Hidden inside were my AD&D (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) books and lead figures from circa 1979, which I hadn't seen for years. I think I looked for them when D&D co-creator Gary Gygax died, to no avail. Tonight I felt a rush of nostalgia at the sight of them, these books that figured in on many happy all night sessions with friends back in college, and during a short period in Columbus Ohio in the early 1980s. But the joy of this rediscovery was nothing compared to the delight that came over me when I spotted a brightly-colored piece of paper, sitting loose inside a sheet protector. Here it is:

This was not the very first map of Mâvarin, but it's very early, probably from 1975. It was my master map for years. I think this is the one I paid my next door neighbor, artist Sue Keeter, to draw. The handwriting, however, is mine. I've been looking for this particular sheet of paper for about a decade.

It's totally out of date, of course, and completely unusable. Unable to find any of my Mâvarin maps when I wrote the bulk of Mages of Mâvarin from 1999 to 2002, I made up new place names and arranged geography from memory and for the convenience of the story. That has to be the official version of where things are now, and the way I envisioned it at age 17 must give way. But I've still glad to have the map back.

The second box I opened was full of my mom's papers. The fact that one folder was labeled "Rent" was a dead giveaway. She signed over the car to us a few years before she died, so the title wasn't in this particular box.

The third file box contained our personal financial records from a time when I still worked at Worldwide Travel. Nothing wrong with that, but it's probably close to the seven year retention date.

The fourth file box and the black accordion file were both empty, except for unused folders in the former. I bought them to organized papers from 2008-9, but haven;t yet done so.

The fifth file box wasn't financials at all, bit old writing, or possibly old fanzine stuff. I'm not 100% sure what it is, because it's the heavy, full metal box with the missing hangle that I recognize as being at least 20 years old. Also, it was in a corner of my office where the night doesn't reach, and it's filled to bursting with old, heavy manila folders full of 8 1/2x11" papers.

There should be at least one more file box, and at least two more accordion files, but they're hiding from me. But in looking for them, I've just found something else that's been missing for years. It's a slim, white three-ring binder, with a somewhat ratty sheet of blue paper slipped in the clear front pocket, on which is handwritten a single word: AUTOGRAPHS.

Harry Chapin and Jose Ferrer

I'm not a huge collector of celebrity signatures, but inside this little binder are quite a few of them, some of which I don't remember having found to put safely in the binder. There's a Polaroid photo of Harry Chapin from 1976 or 1977, with his autograph on the back. There are a handful of signed programs from the Famous Artists Playhouse from the summers of 1972 and 1973, when my brother Steve and I served as ushers. There are letters from Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Madeleine L'Engle, Dick Giordano and Ellis Weiner, the latter in response to my fan letter about his excellent novelization of the Howard the Duck film. There's a signed program from the play I Love My Wife, from a time when the Smothers Brothers gave up their comedy act and yet still couldn't seem to get along without each other professionally. There are signed photos of various actors from Quantum Leap and Doctor Who and even Buffy.

Perhaps the most exciting bit of paper in there, at least for me, is a signed contract for a jazz band to play a gig at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on "the 26th day of July, 1960." Although I do have at least one CD of this band, the Firehouse Five Plus Two, I don't care for their music much. But that's not the point. The contract is signed by the bandleader, Ward Kimball, and that's the reason I bought it on eBay from Archives of History nearly a decade ago. Who was Ward Kimball, or as John and I jokingly call him sometimes, Lord Kimboat? He was one of Walt Disney's Nine Old Men, the legendary animators behind all the classic Disney animated features from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs through The Jungle Book. Ward Kimball was also the main person behind the three Man in Space episodes of the Disney anthology tv series. He shared Walt's fascination with trains, and was generally a rather interesting guy.

Beneath Kimball's signature as bandleader is a signature from the band's booking agent. Archives of History made no claim about this second autograph, but I've had a theory about it ever since I first saw it on eBay. Tonight I finally compared it with a known autograph online. I was right. The Firehouse Five Plus Two's "booking agent" for the purposes of this contract was in fact another of the band members, another of the Nine Old Men as well: none other than one of the most important animators of all time, Frank Thomas.

But I still haven't found that automobile title!

Karen

The Teenager in the Tree

Rani's up a tree again.

I'm sorry, but I had to do it. Again.

After days of trying to reorganize my photo files and clear enough junk off my hard drives to enable the backup to work, I gave this computer its first Windows-based defrag in, well, possibly ever. It took hours and hours. (Norton does an Optimize that takes hardly any time at all.) While I was waiting, I thought about researching agents or starting work on revising and finishing Mages of Mâvarin, but ended up opening Chapter One of Heirs of Mâvarin instead. I figured I'd give my first novel a nice, relaxing read through. I'd double-check that it made sense when read all at once, and catch any lingering typos. Within the first two pages, I found:

• a sentence that ended in a comma,
• a paragraph so choppy that it failed to lead the reader coherently from the previous paragraph to the following one, and
• a paragraph with a really, really long sentence about the view from Rani's tree, followed by a sentence about Rani's view downstream not being nearly as good. Nearly as good as what? The paragraph no longer mentioned that the other view was upstream.

Yuck. And these are the two pages an agent or editor must get past before deciding to give the rest of the book serious consideration? I may as well not send it out, if I'm just going to sabotage my book with a sloppy final edit!

I think I know what the problem is. The last time through, I was working hard at bringing down word count. I frequently revised and combined sentences, trying to make things clearer and less wordy. But in doing so, I apparently failed to notice the occasional artifact left over from the old sentences, or references back to text that no longer existed. Aargh!

Wrong kind of road, wrong kind of trees, wrong kind of river,
and a modern sign in the background; but this is as close
as I can come to visually depicting the scene without ripping
off someone else's photo of a riverside beech tree.

So that last, take-it-from-the-top edit that I had decided not to do on the grounds that it would be just an excuse not to send the thing out, turns out to be necessary after all. So I'm back in Chapter One. Rani is out of the tree and I've fixed the three problems I've listed above, but I still have half the chapter to go through. Maybe the later chapters will be cleaner, but do I really want to take that chance?

As for the backup problem, I've just about decided that it's Picasa's fault, with a little help from me. Picasa shows every folder containing picture files on either my C: drive or my backup I: drive, most of which is from Norton's backup. In working with those files, perhaps even just displaying them, I probably messed up the compression. Now the backup only gets up to 2007 before the backup drive is full.

So I'm going through the pictures on my hard drive, and rearranging them by subject instead of by date. It seems silly to have, for example, a folder nearly every month containing anywhere from two to thirty Doctor Who-related pictures, or to have to search by month for that shot of the pink bison, or to hunt through a zillion folders in a zillion places for that one remembered shot of Tuffy. The new scheme will continue to have a folder for each camera to keep the eras separate, but within each of those will be a master folder for dogs, one for sunsets, etc. And for subjects I tend to obsess on, there will be subfolders sorting the contents by month. I've already crashed Picasa at least once - its cataloging routine was overwhelmed with the changes - but I'll keep going anyway. In the end it should be worth it, both to make things easier to find and because I'll be able to eliminate more dupe files.

Gee, it's a good thing I'm unemployed. It means I have more time for this stuff! (Yeah, right.)

By the way, do any of you live in an area with one or more beech trees beside a river? If so, will you let me use your photo thereof on this blog and the Mâvarin web site? It would be with full credit to you, of course.

Karen

Sleepy Karen is Sleepy

I've spent the evening in Mâvarin, editing Chapter Four of Heirs. My revisions are going well, but I'm getting sleepy - which is understandable, because it took me three tries to get to bed last night. If I don't fall asleep right away, I can easily lie awake for 45 minutes or longer, and the rest of the night ends up seeming like no more than a doze. It's better to get up, take care of whatever is bothering me, and then try again - and yet again, if necessary. But at some point my body has to let me sleep, and I'm hoping that my brain isn't lying to me right now about its willingness to be unconscious.


The assistant to Tuffy's oncologist called today about an appointment we made a few months ago for tomorrow. We just had Tuffy in there a few weeks ago, so I canceled the one for tomorrow. Short of spending another couple thousand dollars on her, this time for tests, there isn't much to be done that we're not already doing. John is trying to establish the right dose of medication for her, based on the vet's advice. Frankly, she's not doing as well as she was a week ago.

Karen

The Naming of Rani Fost

This is about a difficult decision I need to make about my favorite Mâvarin character. I originally hoped to wander into more universal musings about the nature of repetition in fiction, but that will have to wait for another night.

When I was in high school, a million years ago, I sat down at my mother's manual typewriter one day and typed a page or two to replace my stalled novel idea with a new and better one. In that initial effort, a teenage boy in a tree came face to face with a monster. When other people came along, they saw a monster and assumed it had killed the boy. In reality, the monster was the boy. He had killed the monster and become one himself.

34 years have passed, but the core idea of that opening scene has not. Rani Fost is still the embodiment of teenage alienation, a misunderstood monster, a damaged person, the outsider-hero. It's easy to look at the provenance of the character and scoff: if the novel hasn't been published by now, it probably won't be, it must not be any good, she's deluding herself, etc. In fact, I was subjected to this entirely understandable reaction just a couple of days ago, and it stung. But in truth I know better. This isn't some poorly-written piece of garbage, derivative drivel, the same manuscript carried around for 30 years looking for someone to appreciate words mistakenly believed to be golden. This is a story that was shelved for years at a time until I was finally able to tell it at all, which has improved and deepened with each subsequent edit. I've been sidetracked by life lots of times, and failed to keep up the discipline of daily fiction writing, but the stories and the characters have always still be there in the background of my mind. I'm as defensive as hell about them, and probably will be, even if and when the Mâvarin books finally make it into bookstores. But they're good. They really are. And someday, I will overcome market realities and my own insecurities and get the final versions of Rani's adventures into the right hands.

Except that, as I've reluctantly decided this week, he probably won't be called Rani anymore.

Back in 1974, before college, the Internet and globalization, the name Rani held no associations for me except the ones I'd made myself. I didn't know it was a real name for anyone, anywhere. Rani was named after my boyfriend Dan Cheney, with the D replaced by an R, the long e sound from the end of Cheney tacked on the end, and the spelling changed to fit the fictional language I was coming up with for my fictional world. My Rani rhymes with Danny, and has no real world translation beyond that.

But as of 2008, there's a major star in India named Rani, and probably lots of people know the name and its meaning (queen), even in the west. Back in the 1990s there was a Doctor Who villainess named the Rani, and in 2008 the Doctor Who spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures is adding a girl character named Rani to the cast. And when I was last at Disneyland at the end of 2005, our parking pass on the last day came with a little comic book introducing Tinker Bell's fairy friends, one of whom was named Rani.

The name is out there. And it's clearly, irrevocably, a girl's name.

Over the years, I've had to change the names of many of the Mâvarin characters, either to even things out alphabetically, to avoid unwanted associations with other people's characters or just to make them sound better. But I've never touched Rani's name. I never wanted to. He's not the main protagonist in the first novel, but he was there on the very first page, in the initial idea that started things off all those years ago. Whenever I set out to think about the Mâvarin books and Mâvarin characters, I always start with Rani. He is the core character for me, the one I love the most. He's been wandering through my head with that name for 34 years. If now he loses that name, will I lose something of the character himself?

So here's the deal. I've thought of two alternate names, Dani and Randi, and Sara came up with a third, Rami. Any of them would be pronounced with a short a, as in ran, can, Dan, Spam. I don't want to go too far afield from the name Rani, and I want something that's relatively clean of unhelpful associations. Dani, for example, may still seem too feminine, although the final i is a male signifier in the language of Mâvarin. Randi is the name of a famous stage magician and skeptic who debunks paranormal claims, but that association rather amuses me as the name of a character whose magical talents include mindreading. Rami reminds me of Rama, and also of Sam Raimi the director. But at least it isn't spelled the same as either.

As soon as I publish this entry I'll be adding a poll to the sidebar. If you have an opinion about my character's name, please click your choice. Should he be a Rami now, or a Randi? Have you a better name for him? Or should I let him keep his name, justifying it with the fact that it's from a fictional language? Please let me know what you think. Thanks.

Karen (thought of changing that name, too, once upon a time, but didn't)

Lawyers and Agents and Writers and Young Adults

This is going to be brief and freeform, for two reasons. One, I just spent over an hour and a half reading about literary agents in general, one agent in particular, and the agent's court case, and writing an email on the subject that disappeared into the ether due to AOL Mail glitching out on me. Dang, I wish they would completely debug one or the other of their webmail clients and get it online. I never know from one refresh to the next which version of the page I'm going to get, much less whether I'm likely to receive my most recent email. And Google has been glitchy too, with many of my recent alerts based on entries to this very blog arriving as mailer daemon notices, and some of your comment alerts not arriving at all. If I don't comment right away on your Weekend Assignment or Monday Photo Shoot entry, that may be why. I'll find you, though.

But I digress. The point is, all that research has eaten up a fair amount of time, and I need to go to bed now.

The other reason I want to keep this brief is the twinge of paranoid fear that one of the subjects of this post sometimes give me. I'm going to talk about it anyway, but briefly and carefully.

First, though, the positive stuff. Sara directed me tonight to a post on Whatever, noting that YA fantasy is a fairly lucrative market nowadays for writers, more so that sf and fantasy for the adults. This tallies pretty well with my own observations in recent years, not so much the money angle as the large amount, variety and quality of fantasy in Young Adult sections of bookstores. Adult science fiction sections don't seem to have all that much new fantasy these days, and what is there seems to be primarily concerned with sexy young vampires or the dark destiny of the sorceress of Snog, who will take at least three books to achieve it.

Since I've always considered the Mâvarin books at least marginally YA anyhow, this is a good incentive for me to cut back on other obsessions for a bit and get on with finding an agent and publisher. I've never actually submitted Heirs to a YA publisher per se. The few I've researched took agented submissions only. Clearly I need to take action, submitting to the Young Adult market instead of the adult one. After all, the books are about three teenagers and their friends, and nobody has sex. The only thing that's stopped me from definitively calling it YA is the cannibalism incident in Mages. Perhaps I can get away with that; as Sara points out, the scenes aren't all that explicit or gory. There's a definite ick factor, though, and they aren't scenes I can cut from the story.

So I did a little half-hearted digging tonight on the subject of literary agents, and found out two interesting things. One, a well-known writer and critic who liked an early version of Heirs of Mâvarin at Clarion all those years ago is now a literary agent. I will definitely write to him soon.

And two, a certain less savory literary agent has been the subject of a legal motion this month from Wikimedia Foundation, the parent of Wikipedia. Their motion to dismiss her defamation case against them makes interesting reading. Well, you may not think so, but I do. For whatever reason, I've developed a minor fascination with legal principles, especially in the field of communications law. My favorite courses at the University of Phoenix, by far, were in Business Law, and Nina Totenberg, who covers Supreme Court cases, is my favorite NPR reporter.

The motion to dismiss thingy refutes Wikimedia's liability for defamation to Barbara Bauer based on a number of legal principles, the biggest of which is that an interactive website with user-generated content is protected from being held liable for one some third party posted on it. The injured party can only go after the person who posted the offending material. And that's the part where I get nervous, since I was only of a handful of principal editors of the article about Bauer on Wikipedia, which was later deleted. My main contribution consisted of trying to find positive (or at least neutral) material to balance the negative stuff, and I've tried never to call her names or insult her, although I don't absolutely promise that I never have done so. Still, there's a tiny chance she could come after me someday. But I hope not!

Anyway, other legal defenses against her claim include the fact that the article was citing another source, clearly labeled as such, and making no claim on its own authority; the fact that the article never calls her (as is claimed) the "Dumbest of the Twenty worst," which is the title of a blog post on Making Light; the right of fair comment in a matter of public interest (e.g. consumer protection); the lack of a claim by Bauer's lawyers that anything in the article is factually inaccurate, the fact that one of the things they say the article said was refuted in the article itself; and the lack of evidence that Wikimedia acted with malice, a knowledge that a damaging statement was false, or a reckless disregard for whether it was false or not. I'm not going to go into all this in detail tonight, but I agree with all of this.

I just deleted a further sentence or two. Best not say any more for now.

Karen

Livin' La Vida Distraído

Cassandra and "the boys" at Gallifrey One

As you know, Ace, (that's an exposition joke) the plan tonight was to get through a bunch more of my writeup of the Gallifrey One convention, on the grounds that I no longer have a fanzine in which to publish such things. I figure the text should be of interest to Doctor Who fans, and the costume photos may be of interest to a slightly wider audience, 'cause costumes are fun even if you're not familiar with the characters depicted.

Three shots of the moon as it started to be eclipsed.

More and more, however, I find that my brain very seldom does what it's told, at least not when it comes to allocation of leisure time activities. As of 11 PM, I had yet to edit a single photo tonight to accompany this entry. Worse, I failed to go back outside after 8 PM to catch the lunar eclipse at its eclipsiest. Drat! I just plain forgot about it. I do that a lot, I'm sorry to say. Forgetting to do stuff, that is.

Moon over Speedway - but which light is it?

Am I suffering from the beginning of Alzheimer's, three weeks shy of my 51st birthday? Have I a touch of dementia, brought on by a TIA or two or three? No, and no. And no. (That's a King Jor joke; don't worry about it.) Am I cognitively impaired due to sleep deprivation? Again no...well, maybe a little, occasionally.

Solarization applied to the aggregated moon shot.

No, all this has to do with distraction. Whatever it is I'm supposed to be thinking about or doing, more often than not my brain decides that now is the perfect time to obsess about something else entirely.

So what have I been doing tonight instead of editing photos, writing my "con report," working on my RR database or taking bad photos of the moon after 7:20 PM? Was I indulging my Wikipedia addition, watching DVDs, or reading the Doctor Who Forum, perhaps? Not to any significant degree, no. I haven't made a single Wikiedit today, watched only one House episode, and have only read new posts in a few DWF threads. The main thing I've been working on tonight - and this is the good news - is my Heirs of Mâvarin edit, and updating that darn outline.

The moon over St. Michael's tonight looked like a comet.

What happened is this: I thought I had chosen the right timing for that one problematic scene I wrote about a week or two ago. I went back through Chapter Eight, changed a few sentences so that Jamek arrived in the morning instead of the late afternoon, and revised several other passages while I was at it. When I was done, I updated my word count spreadsheet and immediately started on Chapter Nine.

My best one. Several of Scalzi's readers got great shots.

Turns out, the first scene in Chapter Nine makes no sense at all if Jamek arrives on Mâsheldu morning. Jamek has to remember the camped tengremen soon enough after arriving to be plausible. He then has to go see if they're still there, come back, and be sent to find Albi, who has to be far enough away by then to arrive only in the nick of time. I don't expect you to follow all that, but the point is that the timing is critical to making this whole section of the book work. And the more I looked, the more I saw problems, and realized a quick fix wasn't going to resolve them.

This isn't going to work.

I've often thought that a board game, or possibly tokens on a giant map, would be the best way to figure out which characters should be where, doing what, on any given morning, afternoon or evening. But I've tried it, and it doesn't work any better than outlines, index cards or counting it out in my head, which is to say, not very well.

So instead I'm falling back on that outline, updating it chapter by chapter. I'm up to Chapter Three - or was, before I got distracted again an hour ago after I started this entry, first designing a Mâvarin game board and then editing eclipse pictures. With the Gallifrey stuff still to do, photos to edit, the Weekend Assignment and Round Robin coming up, well, it could be a while before I get the timing of scenes in Chapters Eight and Nine straightened out.

See what I mean?

Karen

But I Have No Cat to Vacuum!

Pre-sunset solarized, negative, granite, dark marker, and...?

Nearly five hours ago, I rebooted this computer, for the specific purpose of freeing up RAM so I could run Excel, update my word count spreadsheet for Heirs of Mâvarin, use the data from that to fix the pagination of all my Heirs chapter documents, (or vice versa), and proceed from there to updating my Heirs outline for the first time since January 5, 2006. The purpose of all this activity, aside from getting the manuscript one step closer to being sent out again, was to take a close look at the timing of one event in the book, so that a single paragraph in Chapter Eight will no longer strain credulity. That's right: all that for this one paragraph*:

That first afternoon of what the Princess called Crel’s Conspiracy, Fayubi set the window to look at Prince Carli, wherever he might be. Cathma was surprised to find him in bed somewhere, with Rani (she assumed), Shela, and Jamek all present around him. Carli seemed a little weak and teary-eyed, but then so did Jamek. From the way they were both behaving, Cathma knew she must be watching their long-delayed reunion. She ascribed her brother’s condition to the emotions of the moment, and stopped worrying about him.

It occurred to me yesterday that Cathma has to be pretty oblivious not to wonder why her twin is in bed in the afternoon. I either have to hope nobody notices this, or change the time of day that Jamek arrives at Carli's sickbed. It won't seem so strange for Carli to be in bed if the scene happens at 9 AM or 11 PM. But that creates another problem, because Jamek just arrived by flying horse, and I don't want readers to question how long it took the flying horses to get there. It's true the reader probably doesn't have a clear idea of the air speed of a fully laden flying horse with no coconuts, but it still needs to make sense in terms of the travel time for the characters they're following.

How much faster is a flying horse than one of these guys?

That requires me looking over how long it takes humans to travel that distance, how long it takes tengremen, and how much faster I've said the horses are than the tengremen. And all that has to be measured against how much time they lost giving the horses wings in the first place, and how much time they gained flying until midnight and taking off again at dawn, and when their enemies finished zooming down the road and started camping out to wait for their opportunity to attack. Sounds like work!

So anyway, I rebooted, because the computer has been threatening to freeze up even without an extra program open. Did I then jump right on the word count, or the outline? No, of course not. I messed around on Wikipedia for three hours. Then I started this post, gave it a title (which I'll explain in a moment), and decided it needed a picture of Tuffy. This past hour I've been fooling around with the two photos you see here, for no better reason than it seemed like more fun than writing this entry or paginating chapters.

Tuffy and Tuffy don't like vacuum cleaners.

Kinda cool, though, aren't they? There is, of course, only one Tuffy. The other shot I darkened a little and then threw a bunch of effects at it.

In writers' parlance, "cat vacuuming" refers to finding some extraneous task that doesn't really need to be done right now (if ever), and doing that instead of writing. A lot of writers are cat people for some reason, so I suppose the term makes perfect sense. I won't even insist that in my case it should be called dog-vacuuming. Ooh, Tuffy would freak, big time, if we ever came near her with that scary, noisy machine!

My question, though, is not whether Wikipedia and silly photo edits are cat vacuuming. Clearly they are. I'm wondering whether the updating of the outline and repaginating before this current editing run is finished are themselves cat-vacuumesque. Does it really matter that the outline is two years old, that it mentions a chapter title that I've long since changed, and that chapter breaks have been moved as well? What's the purpose of the outline at this point, when it's unlikely at this stage that any scenes will be added or moved around?

But I worry about Jamek arriving at 9 AM or 11 PM. I worry even more about him arriving when he does now. As much of a continuity junkie as I am about other people's books and tv shows, I want to get my own work right, have it all fit together and make sense. 99 readers out of a hundred may not notice, but there's always that hundredth one. And some of those one-in-a-hundred readers are editors.

Oh, by the way, that paragraph? It's on page 333 in Chapter Eight. I don't guarantee that it's actually the 333rd page of the whole book at this point, but clearly I'm making progress on my 13-chapter book edit.

Even if I do spend a lot of time finding ways to vacuum a virtual cat.

Karen

*I've since revised it.

A Thwarted Attempt to Sleep

I just finished reading a rather good Doctor Who novel by Gary Russell, when I meant to be taking a nap. I'm going to bed now. If I wake up during the night, I'll write a proper entry. I've been having trouble getting to sleep lately, even when I finally made it to bed. I therefore need this 11 PM attempt, really need it.

But I walked the dog again, and I finally solved my King Jor problem with the succession, more or less. I'll write up a quick note now before I forget what I had in mind.

As one of my Away messages says, it's "Nap time! Catch you later."

Karen

Update: Since posting this I've had a continuous, major allergy attack, which so far isn't impressed by the taking of two Benedryl. It's so bad that now, half an hour after taking the pills, my right ear is ringing and the left one is popping. See? Even when I try to be good, it doesn't work! But the succession note has been typed up, a Rani scene tweaked, and Cathma's family tree researched and discovered to be wrong. How can a fictional family tree be wrong? Simple. I've got her father related to Shela instead of her mother. Queen Genva's connection to the lord of Odamas is crucial to the plot of more than one book, so I made a note there, too.

Maybe a bath will clear my sinuses and my lungs. Off I go to try that.

Caught in the Act!

Mostly just pictures tonight, so I can go to bed earlier. Also, there's not much to be said about these shots. I knew that Tuffy did this, but this is the first time I've actually caught her at it, especially on camera. I had just given her a dog biscuit. She really wanted it, but not to eat. Not just then, anyway:

Step 1: Dig a hole in the yard, which John has recently dug up for leveling.

Step 2: Nose the dog biscuit into the new hole.

Step 3. With nose and paw, cover up the hole.

Step 4: Display a dirty snout while begging for more.

Step 6: Repeat until the humans stop giving out biscuits.

In other news, I arranged today to work late for eight days in February so I can take Friday the 15th of February off from work. That's the first day of Gallifrey One, the L.A. convention I used to attend every year until money and year-end accounting pressures made it all but impossible for me. In the old days I used to go with friends, but Tracy's dead and Teresa doesn't live here any more. John doesn't want to attend, so this year I'm going alone. Unless...are YOU going too?

On the writing front, yes, I'm still working on the Heirs edit. I'm on Chapter 5, page 205. It's mostly little wording issues at the moment, no dramatic changes; but I have rooted out some awkward text from the distant past. It kind of surprises me that there's any of that stuff left!

Karen

In Which I Try Not to Moan and Groan

Tonight's sky is unedited.

Okay, first off, the usual excuses: distracted by Doctor Who (and Torchwood), blah, blah; must sleep (yeah, yeah); another sunset photo (ho hum). The sunset was tonight's and it's just as well I photographed it from the parking lot at work, because the color was almost completely gone by the time I reached Safeway. I've tried hard to smudge out a rather obvious feature of the background, and even so I've very nearly given the game away about where I work. But the sky is exactly as the camera captured it. I think I had it set on "Vivid" for this particular shot, but it's pretty close to what my eyes saw.

Through the usual mysterious means, tonight I saw the first episode of Series Two of Torchwood, Doctor Who's darker, sexier spin-off. The guest star was James Marsters, who played Spike on BtVS. He had dark hair for this, and looked a bit older ('cause he is), but even so, John rightly remarked that the character, Captain John Hart, was pretty much Spike. Early Spike, mind you, not the lovesick, ensouled, redeemed version. He and Captain Jack have a history together as partners, Time Agency colleagues and lovers, but Jack has clearly outgrown the amoral bad boy. And guess what: it's not a one shot role, as was previously assumed. He turns up in the season preview trailer as well. Cool.

Other than that, listening to a three hour BBC radio show to get to a five minute interview, and reading the Doctor Who Forum all night, I've actually managed to accomplish a few things. For one thing, I've rearranged the sidebar a bit, and added a box with links to the most current editions of the three memes I'm involved with. Assuming I keep up with it, you'll always be able to easily get to the the announcement entries so you can play along, and see who else has done so. My readership has dipped a little since last summer, so if you detect a whiff of desperation in all the cross-promotion, your virtual nose is not deceiving you. It's not about my personal ego (much); I'm just trying to get enough people aware of the continued existence of the Weekend Assignment and Monday Photo Shoot to drum up sufficient participation to keep the two memes going. That said, I should know better than to look at my blog stats. No good ever comes of it.

The other accomplishment of the evening was getting through eleven pages of editing on Chapter Three of Heirs of Mâvarin. I'm sorry to say I have missed working on the book one night already this year, but other than that I've spent at least a little time on it every night. Tonight's big problem was the scene that follows on from another scene that I cut entirely. I'm not good about making largish deletions, but even I knew that previous scene was lame and didn't need to be there. Five minutes later, though, I rescued the first sentence of it to lead off the next scene about those characters. I then fussed and agonized, agonized and fussed, trying to get a decent transitional sentence or two in behind it. The current version is, um, acceptable.

Karen

Umm, well...

This is the part where I cobble together an entry because it's nearly 3 AM and inspiration hasn't hit yet. Hey, I'd like to be brilliant every night; I really would. But sometimes I have to settled for something less than that. Stick around, though, because sometimes these things get better as I go along.

I've accomplished a few things today, though:

1. I got ten hours of sleep, the benefit of which I'm losing rapidly as I styay up late tonight.

2. I replied to some comments as promised.

3. Okay, maybe it's not an accomplishment, exactly, but I finished watching the Doctor Who box set the first time through, all the episodes with the commentaries turned on and all the special features except the edited down versions of Doctor Who Confidential. I already have full length copies, thanks. Now I'm starting on the episode again, this time with the subtitles on and the commentaries off. I plan to pay particular attention to the music, the better to review the new soundtrack one of these days.

4. With a little prodding from Sara G., I worked on the Heirs opening scene tonight. I managed to cut 70 words from the first 300, rearrange the first two paragraphs, and change Bil and Jord's argument to be more dramatic - which added back about fifty words. I'm not sure it's better overall, but bits of it are. There's a lot of work to be done, and it's not easy for me to make major changes at this late date, let alone this late hour. But I'm trying!


5. I added to my "pumpkin anything" collection tonight with this purchase for tomorrow's post-Mass Coffee Hour. It's a "9 Pumpkin Cheese Pecan Streusel." I'm assuming the "9" is supposed to be the diameter in inches, not the number of pumpkins used in the recipe!

No, it really didn't get better, did it? But at least I got some fiction work in. I can feel good about that. sort of.

Karen

It's Not So Easy

Okay, so I didn't do so well with following through on last night's plans.

Church was no problem. Apparently nothing terrible happened as a result of my Saturday night no-show, and i was readily forgiven.

After church, I was overcome with sleep, do to having been up late Saturday night. I slept until 6:30ish.

Next up, I emptied out most of the remaining stuff from the storage space that was still in my car. Hey, it's only been a month!

So far, so good. But the writing didn't go so well. I spent a lot of time today thinking about that Mâvarin prequel story, mostly while doing something else. I'm no longer convinced that it's salvageable at all.

Others have offered all sorts of advice, both today and in response to previous whinings on my part. Write something non-Mâvarin. Write something about an historical figure from Mâvarin's distant past, which has the advantage of not interfering with the events of the novels. Write about Jace or JW. Try this market or that one. Package some existing material. Try to sell a novelette. Get those agent queries out. Give yourself a break; you really have had a tough couple of weeks. And so on. Pretty much all of the suggestions have merit, but the chances of my following them are highly variable.

I've been thinking today of Tolkien and his body of work. We know now that he wrote a lot of Middle Earth material that wasn't especially commercial, that people buy now more for the sake of completion than due to any expectation that it will approach The Lord of the Rings in readability. He also wrote a few things that weren't explicitly set in Middle Earth at all. For some Tolkien scholars and fans, all of it is significant, but I suspect that most people will never develop any strong feelings for anything he wrote that doesn't involve someone named Baggins. Whoever convinced him to concentrate on LotR as a more commercially viable story than The Silmarillion probably deserves our thanks. But if someone ever told him to set aside this Middle Earth stuff and write about something else, that theoretical person was way off base.

This is going to sound arrogant and self-serving, a combination of hubris and rationalizing; but here goes anyway. I'm not the seminal fantasy writer of the 20th century, or even of the 21st. I don't have extensive notes on legendary characters and invented languages arising from "the Northern thing," or a choice between an obscurely written narrative and a conventionally told one, full of vivid characters. Nevertheless, I know what my magnum opus is, the story with the most potential for finding a readership. Everything else I write, at least in the fiction arena, is in service of the saga or Rani and Carli and Cathma and their friends. I hope that people will like my stories of Joshua Wander, Jace Murphy and Sandy Sheets, but they will never be as important to me, or ultimately to the world, as the Mâvarin books. Whatever else I do with my life, my priority will always be to get Heirs and Mages (and probably a few more books in the series) into bookstores and onto as many readers' shelves as possible.

Yet the Mâvarin books will never even get published unless I find a way to build a demand for them, and that's where the other writing comes in. Yes, I should write and sell some other fiction - Mâvarin, non-Mâvarin, maybe both. Problem is, that's not so easy for me. Quite aside from the current crises involving new jobs, sleep schedule issues and Tuffy's cancer, the truth is that I'm not the sort of writer who has a lot of story ideas. I could probably count on two hands the viable story ideas I've had in my entire life to date, and not run out of fingers. Once I'm in a story, yeah, I can write my way into a bunch of scenes that advance the plot; but a new plot about brand new characters is darn near impossible for me. The Joshua Wander stories (one completed serial, one stalled mystery story) arose from a D&D premise I came up with 30 years ago. The Jace Letters is based on a YA idea I had about five years ago, finally given form by the fact that I drove to New Mexico in 2006 to visit my godson. "Later This Somewhere" is currently stalled out, although I've been playing with it in my head today. "Snowflake" is a mere vignette; ditto the few Ficlets I've written, one of which is from a premise nearly 20 years old. There's a disk jockey story I wrote in high school and would never bother with at this point, and there are two stories I wrote at Clarion in 1977 that probably aren't worth reviving. And that's it: my total non-Mâvarin, non-fanfic output of the last 32 years. Pitiful, really.

Plus, of course, there's the fact that I've published nearly all of this material online, which pretty much kills its commercial potential.

It seems to me, though, that I need to overcome such limitations. Even if I don't care that much about Sandy's anachronistic theater, even if I dump the Mâvarin prequel story about Del and Rani - again, even if I haven't the tiniest wisp of an idea for a new story about any new or existing characters, I've got to get on with writing something. It will be good for the writing as a whole to stretch myself, to find a way to generate ideas and develop them, to follow through and write something new and sell it.

Gulp. Can I do that?

Meanwhile I investigated a couple of HTML editors today. The OpenOffice or whatever it's called promptly ruined my Sermons.html document, replacing iframe coding from Hipcast with links to a file on my hard drive. Arachnophilia looked pretty good, but didn't appear to have a preview mode, or much by way or documentation. The current version of Composer seems to be available only as part of SeaMonkey or somesuch from Mozilla, and I couldn't find the Google one, unless it was the thing in GoogleLabs that wouldn't let me proceed without signing up for gmail. And speaking of online mail servers, is there a way to save my AOL webmail to my hard drive? 'Cause that's the one technical issue that's stopping me from converting my paid AOL account into a free one. I'm sure there's a way to configure and save these things, but I don't really know where to start.

Tuffy, about a week ago.

Enough. I'm due at work in less than 6 hours, and Tuffy's appointment with the oncologist is at 11:30 AM. I've got to get to bed!

Karen

Assimilate!

I dunno. Am I being "all avoidy," as Buffy would say, or just lazy? Or do I just need a little more time to assimilate the recent changes in my life before my brain will let me stop spinning my wheels and get on with the other things I should be doing? I want to be writing, and editing, to solve the problem of no longer having an HTML editor for updating the church web site, and to find out why my computer came up with a bizarre new glitch last night and what to do about it, if anything. But I didn't do any of those things today. Or last night. Or the night before that. I just couldn't make myself do anything useful at all.

After my usual Friday night all-nighter at the computer (and watching Doctor Who, both on cable and on the old laptop), I slept in to an astounding 4 PM - 10 1/2 hours of sleep! I don't regret this one bit, but it makes for a short day. Aside from a little shopping and a little cooking, I've mostly watched Doctor Who some more. I suppose I'm entitled to one day off a week, accomplishing absolutely nothing but rest and relaxation. Or am I? 'Cause you see, I screwed up. Tonight was the Feast of St. Michael at St. Michael & All Angels. I was scheduled to be crucifer at the 6:30 PM Mass, and I promised to be there. Repeatedly. But I forgot all about the Mass until 11:30 PM, long after it was all over. I'll apologize in the morning, but really, I hate letting people down. Somehow I do it anyway.

An attempt to photograph the mural on Broadway
downtown - at 15 MPH

I did read a bit of my email, though, and found more things to assimilate. Carly sent me a link to a list of public art around Tucson, and a request that I photograph more of it. I actually have made repeated attempts to short of few of the more famous, accessible examples, with limited success. The ones I'm posting here tonight after of the big photographic mural near the underpass on Broadway at the edge of downtown Tucson. The cool thing about it is that it shows real people from Tucson's past, photographed on the streets of downtown Tucson over 50 years ago. But it's tough to photograph, in the middle of a narrowing, heavily congested street that's partially blocked off due to construction. Even if I were to find parking nearby, which would be difficult, I'm not sure I could get a good shot of this, even on foot.

A second attempt a few days later was no more successful.

I should probably try it sometime, though. It's right near another large pice of public art: a pedestrian bridge in the shape of a giant Diamondback rattlesnake, complete with tail rattle. Like the mural, it's tough to capture in a photo, partly because of its size and surroundings, partly because I see it only when driving (or occasionally, riding in the passenger's seat). I know I've photographed it repeatedly, but Google disavows all knowledge of my having posted any other the attempts. I'll try again sometime.

Another bit of email today was from a reader I haven't heard from before, who points me toward a page of links from the British Fantasy Society. As an American and Anglophile, I find this both intriguing and of limited usefulness - some of the resources are unlikely to be available to me, but others probably are. He also mentioned a recent find in the "lost" episodes of Doctor Who, the BBC copies of which were destroyed by a BBC emplyee decades ago. Most helpful of all was he suggestion that I consider writing short fiction to get my name out there as a writer. That's part of what my somewhat neglected fiction blog is for, but it's very true that getting a story or three into F&SF or some other major magazine would be a huge boost. Not that it would be easy to do; I'd be competing with major writers for page space. The only submission I ever made to that particular magazine was over thirty years ago, and rightfully rejected. More to the point, I'm really not a short fiction writer for the most part. Nearly everything I write grows and grows until it's at least a novelette. I've managed the occasional vignette in Ficlets, but those aren't really stories; and my short pieces in Messages are Mâvarin apocrypha, letters and diary excerpts that shed additional light on events in the novels rather than standing on their own.

Since reading that email this afternoon, though, I have been thinking about reviving the only standalone Mâvarin short story I've ever attempted. The working title, "What About the Children?", is a bit of a joke, and the plot is very much up in the air. In fact, I've been trying to remember so several years now just what the premise was supposed to be. I think I've finally worked it out, but it's problematic. It involves young Del and Rani, ages 10 and 9, getting hold of some charm or potion or other magical doodad from Dupili, just as Del's "Uncle" Jamek is delirious with fever. Both boys are keen to learn secrets the adults have been keeping from them, especially after Jamek says some odd things during his illness. Unfortunately for the story's viability, I can't let either Del or Rani learn anything really important, because if they do it messes up Heirs of Mâvarin. Nor do I want to use the narrative device known as a "reset button," and have the kids learn all, only to have their memories wiped afterward. Still, I like the idea of their wanting to know about their mysterious, absent fathers, and the problem Shela would face trying to keep Del from learning the truth too soon.

And of course there's also the Jace story to be working on. Sarah K and I are supposed to be collaborating on that, but at the moment i have no clue how to proceed.

My question is this: am I ready to play around with these two stories, or to get back to editing Chapter 28 of Mages? Are Tuffy's illness, the DAW rejection and the new job so brain-jarring that I have to play Monster Match for hours at a time just to cope? Or is that just ordinary, borderline OCD behavior, getting in the way of better, more life-affirming activities?

Tell you what. Tomorrow I will give at least an hour to Jace, young Del or both, and another hour to Mages. I also have the 2008 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market; I should at least glance at it. If I find myself unable to accomplish anything on any of these tasks, I'll know that I really do need more time to assimilate the recent shocks in my life. But if I can get stuff written and edited, it will be a much better distraction than double-clicking on Daleks and Ood, and make me feel better about myself as I nudge myself back in the direction of my lifelong goals.

Karen


Broadway underpass mural: Windows to the Past, Gateway to the Future

Diamondback Bridge